As part of a public outreach program for the Large Hadron Collider, a physicist has created a scale model of the ATLAS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider – out of Legos.

As part of a public outreach program in conjunction with the Niels Bohr Institute, physicist Sascha Mehlhase of the University of Copenhagen has created a scale model of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider – out of Legos.

The ATLAS experiment is focused on high energy collisions of protons. It’s one of the detectors looking for the Higgs boson, and data from the detector recently indicated the discovery of a new subatomic particle.

Here’s a shot of the interior of the Lego model:

The Lego model is built at a 50:1 scale (approximately the same scale as a Lego person to a real person). It’s composed of over 9500 pieces. To construct the model, Mehlhase took about 48 hours to create a 3-D model of the ATLAS experiment. It then took about 33 hours for him to build the whole thing.

Despite the accuracy of the model, the Lego Hadron Collider isn’t capable of accelerating protons to high speeds, nor is it likely to uncover either the Higgs boson or its Lego equivalent.